Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), the fifth- biggest U.S. bank by assets, received a subpoena from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office seeking information on the firm’s activities leading into the credit crisis, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) executives have good reason to be worried about the risk of receiving subpoenas from the Justice Department, and investors should be concerned too.

The U.S. government has a real chance of finding inconsistencies between Goldman executives’ testimony to Congress and their internal documents, which means subpoenas could turn into something more serious, lawyers said.

Matt Taibbi has a new article on Rolling Stone on the recent hearings in the U.S. Senate and whether or not Goldman Sachs executives should be facing criminal trials or not in the wake of ongoing investigations into their part in the financial meltdown we went through a few years ago. CNN decided to bring in the Atlantic Monthly’s Wall Street apologist Megan McArdle to debate Taibbi on Your Money.

A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges

Rolling Stones-

They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Holder told the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing today that the department is reviewing the April report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat. Holder didn’t say which aspects of the report, which probed the causes of 2008 financial crisis, are under review

In 2007, the report says, Deutsche Bank rushed to sell off mortgage-backed investments amid worries that the market for subprime loans was deteriorating.

“Keep your fingers crossed but I think we will price this just before the market falls off a cliff,” a Deutsche Bank manager wrote in February 2007 about a deal stocked with securities created from raw material produced by Ameriquest and other subprime lenders.

Dylan Ratigan with special guest New York Times’ Louise Story, discussing the 600+ page report uncovering Goldman Sachs scheme to defraud investors. According to Bloomberg, The U.S. Justice Department and regulators will have to determine whether employees and executives of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. violated any laws when they traded securities tied to the housing market and testified to Congress about the transactions, Senator Carl Levin said.

WALL STREET AND
THE FINANCIAL CRISIS:

Anatomy of a Financial Collapse

~

MAJORITY AND MINORITY
STAFF REPORT

PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE
ON INVESTIGATIONS

UNITED STATES SENATE

April 13, 2011

In the fall of 2008, America suffered a devastating economic collapse. Once valuable securities lost most or all of their value, debt markets froze, stock markets plunged, and storied financial firms went under. Millions of Americans lost their jobs; millions of families lost their homes; and good businesses shut down. These events cast the United States into an economic recession so deep that the country has yet to fully recover.

This Report is the product of a two-year, bipartisan investigation by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into the origins of the 2008 financial crisis. The goals of this investigation were to construct a public record of the facts in order to deepen the understanding of what happened; identify some of the root causes of the crisis; and provide a factual foundation for the ongoing effort to fortify the country against the recurrence of a similar crisis in the future.

Using internal documents, communications, and interviews, the Report attempts to provide the clearest picture yet of what took place inside the walls of some of the financial institutions and regulatory agencies that contributed to the crisis. The investigation found that the crisis was not a natural disaster, but the result of high risk, complex financial products; undisclosed conflicts of interest; and the failure of regulators, the credit rating agencies, and the market itself to rein in the excesses of Wall Street.

While this Report does not attempt to examine every key moment, or analyze every important cause of the crisis, it provides new, detailed, and compelling evidence of what happened. In so doing, we hope the Report leads to solutions that prevent it from happening again.